American airborne landings in Normandy were a series of military operations carried by the United States as part of Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy by the Allies on June 6, 1944, during World War II. In the opening maneuver of the Normandy landings, about 13,100 American paratroopers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, then 3,937 glider infantrymen, were dropped in Normandy via two parachute and six glider missions.
The divisions were part of the U.S. VII Corps, which sought to capture Cherbourg and thus establish an allied supply port. The two airborne divisions were assigned to block approaches toward the amphibious landings at Utah Beach, to capture causeway exits off the beaches, and to establish crossings over the Douve river at Carentan to help the U.S. V Corps merge the two American beachheads.
The assaulting force took three days to block the approaches to Utah, mostly because many troops landed off-target during their drops. Still, German forces were unable to exploit the chaos. Despite many units' tenacious defense of their strongpoints, all were overwhelmed within the week.
Background
[Except where footnoted, information in this article is from the USAF official history: Warren, Airborne Operations in World War II, European Theater]
Plans and revisions
Plans for the invasion of Normandy went through several preliminary phases throughout 1943, during which the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) allocated 13½ U.S. troop carrier groups to an undefined airborne assault. The actual size, objectives, and details of the plan were not drawn up until after General Dwight D. Eisenhower became Supreme Allied Commander in January 1944. In mid-February Eisenhower received word from Headquarters U.S. Army Air Forces that the TO&E of the C-47 Skytrain groups would be increased from 52 to 64 aircraft (plus nine spares) by April 1 to meet his requirements. At the same time the commander of the U.S. First Army, Lieutenant General Omar Bradley, won approval of a plan to land two airborne divisions on the Cotentin Peninsula, one to seize the beach causeways and block the eastern half at Carentan from German reinforcements, the other to block the western corridor at La Haye-du-Puits in a second lift. The exposed and perilous nature of the La Haye de Puits mission was assigned to the veteran 82nd Airborne Division ("The All-Americans"), commanded by Major General Matthew Ridgway, while the causeway mission was given to the untested 101st Airborne Division ("The Screaming Eagles"), which received a new commander in March, Brigadier General Maxwell D. Taylor, formerly the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division Artillery who had also been temporary assistant division commander (ADC) of the 82nd Airborne Division, replacing Major General William C. Lee, who suffered a heart attack and returned to the United States.
Bradley insisted that 75 percent of the airborne assault be delivered by gliders for concentration of forces. Because it would be unsupported by naval and corps artillery, Ridgway, commanding the 82nd Airborne Division, also wanted a glider assault to deliver his organic artillery. The use of gliders was planned until April 18, when tests under realistic conditions resulted in excessive accidents and destruction of many gliders. On April 28 the plan was changed; the entire assault force would be inserted by parachute drop at night in one lift, with gliders providing reinforcement during the day.
The Germans, who had neglected to fortify Normandy, began constructing defenses and obstacles against airborne assault in the Cotentin, including specifically the planned drop zones of the 82nd Airborne Division. At first no change in plans were made, but when significant German forces were moved into the Cotentin in mid-May, the drop zones of the 82nd Airborne Division were relocated, even though detailed plans had already been formulated and training had proceeded based on them.
Just ten days before D-Day, a compromise was reached. Because of the heavier German presence, Bradley, the First Army commander, wanted the 82nd Airborne Division landed close to the 101st Airborne Division for mutual support if needed. Major General J. Lawton Collins, commanding the VII Corps, however, wanted the drops made west of the Merderet to seize a bridgehead. On May 27 the drop zones were relocated 10 miles (16 km) east of Le Haye-du-Puits along both sides of the Merderet. The 101st Airborne Division's 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR), which had originally been given the task of capturing Sainte-Mère-Église, was shifted to protect the Carentan flank, and the capture of Sainte-Mère-Église was assigned to the veteran 505th PIR of the 82nd Airborne Division.
For the troop carriers, experiences in the Allied invasion of Sicily the previous year had dictated a route that avoided Allied naval forces and German anti-aircraft defenses along the eastern shore of the Cotentin. On April 12 a route was approved that would depart England at Portland Bill, fly at low altitude southwest over water, then turn 90 degrees to the southeast and come in "by the back door" over the western coast. At the initial point the 82nd Airborne Division would continue straight to La Haye-du-Puits, and the 101st Airborne Division would make a small left turn and fly to Utah Beach. The plan called for a right turn after drops and a return on the reciprocal route.
However the change in drop zones on May 27 and the increased size of German defenses made the risk to the planes from ground fire much greater, and the routes were modified so that the 101st Airborne Division would fly a more southerly ingress route along the Douve River (which would also provide a better visual landmark at night for the inexperienced troop carrier pilots). Over the reluctance of the naval commanders, exit routes from the drop zones were changed to fly over Utah Beach, then northward in a 10 miles (16 km) wide "safety corridor", then northwest above Cherbourg. As late as May 31 routes for the glider missions were changed to avoid overflying the peninsula in daylight.
Preparations
IX Troop Carrier Command (TCC) was formed in October 1943 to carry out the airborne assault mission in the invasion. Brigadier General Paul L. Williams, who had commanded the troop carrier operations in Sicily and Italy, took command in February 1944. The TCC command and staff officers were an excellent mix of combat veterans from those earlier assaults, and a few key officers were held over for continuity.
The 14 groups assigned to IX TCC were a mixture of experience. Four had seen significant combat in the Twelfth Air Force. Four had no combat experience but had trained together for more than a year in the United States. Four others had been in existence less than nine months and arrived in the United Kingdom one month after training began. One had experience only as a transport (cargo carrying) group and the last had been recently formed.
Joint training with airborne troops and an emphasis on night formation flying began at the start of March. The veteran 52nd Troop Carrier Wing (TCW), wedded to the 82nd Airborne, progressed rapidly and by the end of April had completed several successful night drops. The 53rd TCW, working with the 101st, also progressed well (although one practice mission on April 4 in poor visibility resulted in a badly scattered drop) but two of its groups concentrated on glider missions. By the end of April joint training with both airborne divisions ceased when Taylor and Ridgway deemed that their units had jumped enough. The 50th TCW did not begin training until April 3 and progressed more slowly, then was hampered when the troops ceased jumping.
A divisional night jump exercise for the 101st Airborne scheduled for May 7, Exercise Eagle, was postponed to May 11-May 12 and became a dress rehearsal for both divisions. The 52nd TCW, carrying only two token paratroopers on each C-47, performed satisfactorily although the two lead planes of the 316th Troop Carrier Group (TCG) collided in mid-air, killing 14 including the group commander, Col. Burton R. Fleet. The 53rd TCW was judged "uniformly successful" in its drops. The lesser-trained 50th TCW, however, got lost in haze when its pathfinders failed to turn on their navigation beacons. It continued training till the end of the month with simulated drops in which pathfinders guided them to drop zones. The 315th and 442d Groups, which had never dropped troops until May and were judged the command's "weak sisters", continued to train almost nightly, dropping paratroopers who had not completed their quota of jumps. Three proficiency tests at the end of the month, making simulated drops, were rated as fully qualified. The inspectors, however, made their judgments without factoring that most of the successful missions had been flown in clear weather.
By the end of May 1944, the IX Troop Carrier Command had available 1,207 Douglas C-47 Skytrain troop carrier airplanes and was one-third overstrength, creating a strong reserve. Three quarters of the planes were less than one year old on D-Day, and all were in excellent condition. Engine problems during training had resulted in a high number of aborted sorties, but all had been replaced to eliminate the problem. All matériel requested by commanders in IX TCC, including armor plating, had been received with the exception of self-sealing fuel tanks, which Chief of the Army Air Forces General Henry H. Arnold had personally rejected because of limited supplies.
Crew availability exceeded numbers of aircraft, but 40 percent were recent-arriving crews or individual replacements who had not been present for much of the night formation training. As a result, 20 percent of the 924 crews committed to the parachute mission on D-Day had minimum night training and fully three-fourths of all crews had never been under fire. Over 2,100 CG-4 Waco gliders had been sent to the United Kingdom, and after attrition during training operations, 1,118 were available for operations, along with 301 Airspeed Horsa gliders received from the British. Trained crews sufficient to pilot 951 gliders were available, and at least five of the troop carrier groups intensively trained for glider missions.
Because of the requirement for absolute radio silence and a study that warned that the thousands of Allied aircraft flying on D-Day would break down the existing system, plans were formulated to mark aircraft including gliders with black-and-white stripes to facilitate aircraft recognition. Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, commander of the Allied Expeditionary Air Force, approved the use of the recognition markings on May 17.
For the troop carrier aircraft this was in the form of three white and two black stripes, each two feet (60 cm) wide, around the fuselage behind the exit doors and from front to back on the outer wings. A test exercise was flown by selected aircraft over the invasion fleet on June 1, but to maintain security, orders to paint stripes were not issued until June 3.
Opposing forces
Pathfinders
The 300 men of the pathfinder companies were organized into teams of 14-18 paratroops each, whose main responsibility would be to deploy the ground beacon of the Rebecca/Eureka transponding radar system, and set out holophane marking lights. The Rebecca, an airborne sender-receiver, indicated on its scope the direction and approximate range of the Eureka, a responsor beacon. The paratroops trained at the school for two months with the troop carrier crews, but although every C-47 in IX TCC had a Rebecca interrogator installed, to keep from jamming the system with hundreds of signals, only flight leads were authorized to use it in the vicinity of the drop zones.
Despite many early failures in its employment, the Eureka-Rebecca system had been used with high accuracy in Italy in a night drop of the 82nd Airborne Division to reinforce the U.S. Fifth Army during the Salerno landings, codenamed Operation Avalanche, in September 1943. However, a shortcoming of the system was that within 2 miles (3.2 km) of the ground emitter, the signals merged into a single blip in which both range and bearing were lost. The system was designed to steer large formations of aircraft to within a few miles of a drop zone, at which point the holophane marking lights or other visual markers would guide completion of the drop.